Audience Costs and China’s South China Sea Policy

Abstract

China’s island building in the South China Sea has received considerable attention from scholars, the media and policy-related officials in recent years. In this article, we conduct a survey to assess the opinions of Chinese university students as it regards their views of any moves by the Chinese government to retreat from its island building and the South China Sea claims due to international pressure. Since China has laid claim to much of the South China Sea via its ‘nine-dash line’, if it were to reverse course and retreat from its man-made islands or remove military installations, how would that play out domestically? Would the Chinese government incur audience costs for doing so? We hypothesise that it would. More specifically, we find it likely that Chinese university students would seek to hold their government accountable for claims to the South China Sea that it has made recently, making it more difficult for the government to retreat from or otherwise adopt a more flexible policy on the South China Sea if it chose to do so. The findings are significant for the audience costs literature, Chinese foreign policy, and South China Sea territoriality studies, in addition to having important policy implications.